Holographic storage, 150GB discs finally coming to market

After years of work, InPhase Technologies is finally ready to launch their …

Earlier this month, we launched The Server Room, Ars Technica's new community for IT professionals. The Server Room launch is sponsored by Dell’s Future of Storage. This article on a new archival backup technology is part of an ongoing topics and discussions related to IT and storage technology.

Holographic storage maker InPhase, a spinoff of Bell Labs, first appeared on the radar back in 2005. Initially, the company claimed that it would soon offer holographic discs at 300GB densities, with later disc densities rising as high as 1TB. InPhase's actual shipping product has been coming real soon now for the past few years, but reports have the company releasing its Tapestry hologram archival product this coming May. This time, apparently, they really, really, really, really mean it. Pinkie swear.

The first-generation Tapestry 300r device will use 300GB holographic discs, currently priced at $180 per disc in volume quantities. Initial drive transfer speed will be 20MBps, with transfer rates and available storage rising to 80MBps/800GB with the 800r, and 120MBps/1.6TB with the 1600r. InPhase has given no guidance on when we might see these units, which is probably a good idea, given how long it has taken the company to ready the 300r.

The Tapestry 300r holographic storage system is impressive on a technological level, but whether that product will take hold in the market is another question altogether. At just under $18,000 per unit, the Tapestry 300r isn't exactly cheap, and a 20MBps data transfer rate, while not terrible, isn't going to drop any jaws.

At the moment, InPhase is pushing Tapestry as an archive solution rather than a data backup system. One of the great advantages of holographic media is that it can last for decades—InPhase claims a 50-year lifetime—and the company is quick to emphasize these aspects in its product brochure (PDF), which, as of this writing, hasn't been updated since April 9, 2007. The Tapestry 300r supports 68-pin SCSI (160-320), Fibre Channel 4GB, FTP, gigabit Ethernet, 1394-attached cameras, Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), and iSCSI as well. The unit appears to only hold (and write) to one disc at a time, which could make major archival procedures tedious—swapping holographic discs in 2008 isn't any more fun than swapping 1.44MB floppies was in 1990.

Questions over long-term backwards compatibility may also blunt Tapestry 300r sales. The company's literature states that the yet-to-be-released Tapestry 800r and 1600r will be backwards compatible with 300r discs, but does not state that the 300r will be able to read 800r and 1600r media once those discs are available. If it can't, companies and institutions that would otherwise be interested in the product may elect to wait for later products in the series. $18,000 is quite a lot to pay for a single point of access, particularly when one is faced with the prospect of buying a new unit just three to four years later.

As for the issue of whether or not Tapestry is shipping for real this time, we did some follow-up calls with data storage solution provider ISSI Data, which currently offers the units for rent. ISSI Data told us that only a small number of Tapestry 300r demo units will be available in May. These units will be limited to a 150GB capacity, but the discs they burn will be read-compatible with the production version of the 300r, which is currently scheduled to go on the market in September. So once again, all we have is another promised ship date.

What does your business use for long-term archival storage? Would a technology like InPhase's be attractive if it came to market and the cost per megabyte were to come down, or are there other obstacles to its adoption? Drop into The Server Room and join the conversation.